My patrons keep voting for more of The Hungry Stars, so I keep delivering. Here’s the next chapter in the book, still with that new-font smell! Grace and company made their play to escape from Nibiru, but things went sideways. Defeated and with no more strategies or tricks to play, they were looking at the end… until a voice from the dark whispered.
Below is an excerpt from the chapter; even though they might have gotten some timely assistance, they’re not safe yet. For the full text, check out the links above and enjoy!
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“There’s a large cloaking field close to you. Coordinates have been sent. Can you investigate?”
Grace looked at the info. ‘Close’ was right; they’d come within a million kilometers of it. Wolfssegen’s sensors hadn’t noticed it. Well, that was to be expected for a cloaking field, but now that the destroyer had a reason to look at it…
The main viewscreen changed from one angle of the starfield to another. There seemed to be nothing there, just one more patch of extrasolar space within Nibiru’s Kuiper Belt, but the handful of stars centered in the middle of the viewscreen… they were twinkling. Grace’s blood ran cold. “How large is large?” she asked, glancing over at Allyria. The other woman shook her head, unable to even begin to guess at an answer.
The AI’s response wasn’t any more comforting. “We’re not sure.”
That admission sent a cold spike down Grace’s spine, enough to temporarily dull the ache in her amputated arm. She looked at her crew, her gaze settling on Fischer. “Can you tell us anything?”
“If we’re where I think we are, you need to see it,” he told her.
“What is it?” Grace pressed. “What’s out here?”
“I don’t know,” Emil confessed. “They call it the Prophet’s Hand, and it’s the highest-security facility in the League. I had authorization to work under Brother’s shell and even I can’t tell you what it is. That one,” he nodded at the incapacitated commander, “probably doesn’t know, either. Only the ship’s Observer and captain would have had been cleared for that knowledge. A long time ago, we got some people aboard, but we never heard from any of them again. Even when the Enbee program got off the ground, the Hand was considered too dangerous. All we know for sure is that it’s an eitr installation, somehow vital to the League’s future plans.”
“Copy that.” Grace re-opened the channel to Leah. “We’ll push in and take a look, but it might be faster if you do it.”
“That’s not possible,” the AI answered.
The cold feeling got suddenly worse. Grace met Allyria’s eyes. The Verrish shook her head. Wolfssegen’s sensors were too badly damaged to see beyond a few million kilometers.“Why not?”
“My sublight capability is severely limited,” Leah answered matter-of-factly. A fair amount of her ship-self had been vapourized, blown off or dissolved but enough remain to outmass Bathory by a significant margin and overtax the Naiad’s engines. She was no faster than the limping destroyer, “and IKaggen…” an additional part of her focused on the sensor data coming to her, a desperate yet impotent urge to intervene roiling aimlessly through her mind. “…has been engaged.”
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