A new chapter of Descent to enjoy. Bathory and IKaggen are being pursued by some silly little guys. It’s no big deal. It’s fine, everything’s fine, it’s not like these little puppers completely exterminated a civilization that could build planet-sized structures.
Oh, they did do that?
Well, there’s only eight of them and all of them put together are smaller than IKaggen. It’s not like those are the only ones we can see and there’s literally hundreds of thousands asleep nearby.
Oh, there are?
Well, their weapons technology is fairly archaic and since they’ve spent thousands of years in hibernation, they haven’t upgraded it and certainly don’t have it specialized to kill starships hundreds of times their size.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Well, there’s a snippet below and a full chapter at the link above to learn more about Shrikes and the predicament our protagonists have found (willingly placed) themselves in! Enjoy!
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Cerulean Eight was trying to compensate for the enemy’s countermeasures, but the pursuing vessels were masterworks of stealth technology design. They had little active jamming systems and their defences were almost entirely passive. Their hulls were covered with adaptive paint, blending them seamlessly into the background to make visual detection and tracking nearly impossible, their emissions control even when they were at combat stations and full burn was superb, giving them an energy signature less than that of a powered EVA suit or small satellite.
+i want to know how you can do that+
+and i’ll pull you apart to find out+
But that wasn’t her mission. All other concerns secondary. Making it to the next position along their route undamaged and intact mattered more than her curiousity or any potential technological acquisitions. The enemy would muster against them in the next system and in greater numbers. A battle was coming, but this one didn’t need to be fought. At least, if IKaggen and Bathory could maintain their lead long enough to reach the warp threshold.
By conventional calculations, that was likely. The Enemy had made one mistake so far; they’d positioned this attack group deeper in-system than IKaggen or Bathory were going, assuming that the shell world and the other inner-system megastructures would act as they always had and draw the curious, avaricious and incautious down the gravity well to be ambushed. Unfortunately for them, Cerulean Eight wasn’t on a mission of exploration. While it was intensely interested in the wealth of technology on display within Pathway 02, just like it wanted a chance to disassemble a Shrike, the study of the Speakers’ remains was not its goal. Only one objective mattered.
The Shrikes were faster than either of them, but they’d begun too far away from Pathway 02’s shift limit. Even at their rate of acceleration, they simply couldn’t catch IKaggen or Bathory. At least, based on any conventional tactical assessments, but as Bathory had already hinted with her history lesson, the Shrikes were anything but conventional in their tactics.
This, the Fleet’s first battle against the Shrikes, would be little more than a skirmish, but it would not be the last. The Speakers’ worlds might be dead, but the wraiths that had taken them for their own were as ravenous as the day they had done the impossible in pouring through a warp gate and setting upon its builders. Every bit of warmth that entered their domains, whether it came from a beating heart or a starship’s reactor, was theirs to snuff out and add its remains to the graves in which they’d already buried an entire civilization.
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