13 Rebuild by Stuart Grosse

Author:Stuart Grosse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

(Mercenary Vessel Fall of Theramore, Interstellar Space)

“-dy!”

Everything was pain. Oh Gods, why did everything hurt? She hadn’t had THAT much to drink, right? No, wait, she was on ship. She never drank on ship. Bad example for the crew. So why did everything hurt? And what was that wailing?

“Milady! Can you understand me?”

The lights finally stopped swimming in front of her eyes, and Lady Proudmoore managed to focus on the person speaking to her. Who? Oh, yes, the Captain. He looked like he’d been injured.

“What?”

“The Black Stars, milady. They hit us with something we’ve never seen before. We’re on emergency power and dead in the water.”

Lady Proudmoore grit her teeth, fighting through the pain (and probable concussion) to say, “How bad?”

“Unknown, milady. We have limited internal communications, but they are sketchy where we do have them, and we can’t raise anyone aft of section five on any deck. It is like the aft two thirds of the ship are just GONE!”

“Sensors!”

The sensor tech who had been watching the fight came up, and touched her shoulder lightly, and she felt her head get slightly better. “Sorry, Ma’am. Best I can do with my powers. Right now we’re triaging wounded and I’m the only one with healing Psy powers.” He took a breath, and then said, “I have gone over the data we have before we were hit. In each case we detected weapons fire from the Starlight Raven approximately one hundred and twenty seconds AFTER we got the light from the frigates being destroyed. Sensors went out before we could get the light from whatever hit us.”

That thought chilled the blood of any spacer. There was only one thing that could make your enemy detect the light of an attack after the attack had already hit. “S-superluminal? In a tarpit?”

The Captain looked shaken as well. “But there are laws! Treaties! It is madness! No one would dare use superluminal weapons! The entire galaxy would rise up against them!”

Slowly, Lady Proudmoore shook her head. “There are treaties against using them against inhabited planets, even by accident. If a superluminal weapon should miss and hit any planet or moon with a population, the treaties would demand everyone descend upon Black Star and rip it apart. But there are no planets here.”

The Captain looked ‘agitated’, to put it mildly, and she had to agree with the emotion at the moment. “How did they launch a superluminal weapon while in a tarpit? Surely there is no one mad enough to tamper with the safeguards?”

The Sensor tech shook his head. “The owner is a Nomad. Didn’t one of them start the Imperial Civil War by crashing a shuttle into the Imperial Palace since they knew they wouldn’t die?”

Lady Proudmoore sighed. “There is no point asking if ‘whether’ someone would do such a thing. They clearly have. Now, can we get this news out? Or call for a rescue?”

The Captain shook his head as he looked up from a tablet one of the techs handed him. “Long-range communications are dead.

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