My patrons keep voting for it, so I keep enabling their addiction. Wait… is it enabling if I’m also the dealer? A question for the ages.
Anyways, here is a new chapter for The Hungry Stars. The situation on and above Nibiru continues to get more complicated. On the ground, Grace and company are given a welcome surprise. In orbit, Leah gets a very unwelcome surprise. There’s a reason why Vegvisir and Exploration Fleet’s brand-new cruisers were tasked to seek out Nemesis and it’s not just because of their mission statement. Nibiru is a planet of secrets and those secrets can be shocking, surprising… or very, very dangerous as Leah herself realizes in the excerpt below. For the full chapter and the rest of the story, check out the links above and I hope you enjoy!
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The attack ships opened the range between themselves and Lakhesis, no longer flying suicidally close to the strike cruiser, but still close that it was nearly impossible to target them. As they pulled away and looped back in, the Cyclotomasflipped, rolled and twisted to bring their heavy guns to bear as powerful thruster arrays kept them moving on seemingly erratic, though nonetheless perfectly-executed courses that stymied Cerulean Two’s predictive targeting algorithms. Their coordination was beyond anything she’d ever seen before, and it was quite literally killing her.
+estimated combat capability: 72.8%+
Leah’s ship-self shuddered as another gaser struck her shields, punching through them and cutting into her vitals. The attackers’ beams hit as hard as capital-grade mounts and every strike eroded her combat capability a little more. Her retaliatory fire hit nothing but open space, and the attack ships were too fast for her surprise them by shifting position or orientation. Every maneuver she employed was instantly countered.
They were too fast. Another weapons mount went offline, one of those Leah been directing moonside to make sure Cyclotomas’ host vessels stayed in their berths. If the hangar shields dropped, Lakhesis was ready to hit the unprotected ships… and the enemy knew it. They were trying to cripple enough of her heavier batteries that the capital reinforcements could safely launch.
Vegvisir was pulling back, its flagging shields bolstered by the other trio of Cyclotoma circling it, the smaller ships acting as secondary shield projectors. Leah had never seen that tactic before; they were sitting on the Exploration cruiser’s shield boundary. By all logic, that should had caused a burst of feedback large enough to destroy them and obliterate Vegvisir’s shield systems, but instead their shields were merging with its own, allowing the larger vessel to safely pull out of combat. Once it did, they would join their comrades in dismantling her ship-self…
…and three of them were more than she could handle. Their rockets were punching right through her shields to take out her sensor facilities, comm nodes, shield projectors and weapons mounts, just like Naiad weaponry. Their maneuverability and lethality was on par with younger predator-ships. Their course and speed was too variable to track and they were too close…
They were going to kill her.
~
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