My patrons voted again for more of The Hungry Stars, so that’s what they get. This is Chapter 29, close to the halfway mark in the story. Things on Nibiru continue to go off the rails with Echo and her crew breaking into a cloning facility and freeing a captive Lydia Jameson. That doesn’t go unnoticed and the League is scrambling to respond, but they have more than just humans and mechanical drones to call upon, as Echo is learning in the excerpt below.
For the full story, check out the links above and I hope you enjoy!
~
Grace was the first to notice. “What’s wrong?”
“Stepmother,” Echo replied. The monster was coming, running down the slopes towards her. It had entered the network after they’d ambushed the SWAT team, and it was becoming more aggressive, requiring more of her attention. The brief breach she’d made in their jamming had been noticed. She didn’t know if she’d be able to do that again. It wouldn’t work with her and she couldn’t assume that this parasitic mind was any less capable.
She could withdraw from the League’s cyberspace and back into this body, but that would leave her team vulnerable. They wouldn’t have been able to ambush the SWAT team without her control of local systems, misdirections and false location data. They wouldn’t even gotten into the JMC and they certainly wouldn’t get off the planet without her.
“Can you handle her?”
“This is her home ground,” Echo reminded the young woman. “She has an advantage here, but I’m evading her. For now.”
Echo mounted the stairs to a lunge overlooking the first floor with a view of the grounds in front of the tower. There was a young man sitting in one of the large chairs, his arms conspicuously placed on the armrests in full view of anyone arriving on the mezzanine.
“Hello, Edwin,” Echo greeted him.
“I thought you might come here,” he said. “This offers an advantageous vantage point and the polarized windows will make it hard to see inside.”
“Is that a prime minister’s tactical opinion?”
“No. It’s information from the eitr.”
Doctor Constance had used that same world. “That’s what you call them?”
The man’s proxy shook his head. “There’s no them, captain. There’s only us. We might make a distinction for the sake of specificity, but there is no division between us. As I told you before, this is symbiosis.”
~
Proximal Flame's Fiction 
Got to admit this third book has really cooled me on the series. The first two books I thought were quite amazing. Now this one has felt pretty predictable at least to this point. I really hope there is a good twist coming up cause at this point I don’t know I just feel like the build up for this one was to a pretty obvious conclusion and thus dragged it out WAY too long for the payout. The villains fit the mold of (Phyrexians, Borg, Cybermen, etc.) and nothing that really strikes me out as unique. And it just feels like not much has really happened. The Protagonists have been at this for nearly 3 years IRL and all they have done is feels like it could have been summed up in honestly 4 or 5 chapters rather then the over 20.
I hate to be so negative on this but I really do hope you capture some of the glory of the previous two books and that I’m just being too impatient for the payoff/false payoff. Best Wishes.
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