Sneak Peek - The Last Angel: The Hungry Stars, Chapter 16 (Patreon)

Last week I didn't think I had enough for a sneak peek and this week, I planned to be done by Thursday or Friday, so I wasn't originally planning on making a peek here and just give you guys the full chapter. It seems that some people were jonesing pretty hard ( :P ) for that extra hit, so I present to you now a quick look at events from the upcoming chapter. I still have two edits/redrafts to run through, so I'm intending to get this chapter up by the end of the week. Stayed tuned, and hope you enjoy!

~

Captain Olaf Koenig, Triquetran Navy, sat on his bridge staring out at the emptiness that surrounded his ship and tried to tell himself that his right arm wasn’t actually itching. Despite what Dr. Mau said, Captain Koenig swore he could still feel his missing limb. He’d lost it at the shoulder during the frenetic, desperate flight from Sol and the ensuing nerve damage meant even a cloned replacement wasn’t taking well. It would have to be a full prosthetic and that, only after the regeneration of his nerve endings was completed. Until then, he (as Commander Stebbs said and Koenig would have to find some way of paying his first officer back for the atrociously bad pun) needed a hand with some things.

At least we survived.They’d been lucky just to do that. Kongō’s journey to Earth had been... tricky. They’d had to pass through a sizable chunk of the Compact’s territory to reach the Confederacy’s former territory. They’d stuck to deep space and interstellar position checks, staying well away from any possible signs of civilization. That hadn’t been possible here in the Confederate sector. Riding Hood could be anywhere, and they’d had to expose themselves, checking system traffic and comm chatter for any hint of their quarry.

They’d found nothing but small, scattered colonies, ships that more often than not ignored or avoided Kongōwhenever they detected the exploration cruiser... and butchery. Point Phanes was just one stop among many in their search, but in that system they’d found something that shocked the entire crew. A world, once vibrant and filled with life, reduced to a churning, radioactive husk. Something had split a continent and scorched the planet so thoroughly that nothing more than lithotrophic microorganisms could possibly still live there. The extermination could only have been more complete if the entire planet had been mass-scattered.

Koenig had been careful not to let rumours run wild, even though he’d known what was responsible. They’d pressed on, doing everything they could to fulfill their mission, but with no trace of Riding Hood to be found. They’d arrived in Sol, and that was where everything had truly gone wrong.