Fallen Empire: Ten Davids, Two Goliaths (Kindle Worlds Novella) by Matthew Quinn

Author:Matthew Quinn [Quinn, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Kindle Worlds
Published: 2017-04-17T22:00:00+00:00

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It didn’t take long for Tammy to find the target on her own sensors. It wasn’t a Fang, that was for certain, or she could have flown right over it. It was big, but it wasn’t big enough to be one of the sensor birds that flew with a fighter squadron. Some kind of drone? If the Empire replaced manned spacecraft with drones, the Alliance would be in big trouble.

She fed her engines more power, kicking the fighter after the target. As she got close, her LIDAR painted it in more detail. It was long and skinny, like an Imperial clipper, but clippers were used for the highest-priority transportation missions. As far as she knew, there weren’t any clippers specialized for electronic warfare. Two Imperial escort cruisers on a training mission wouldn’t have such a craft with them.

She closed her eyes, thinking back to the last time she’d communed with the Suns Trinity. It was after she’d fled the Naval base orbiting Arkadius with the master-at-arms and his henchmen at her heels, before she’d found her way to the Alliance. She’d found a nice quiet corner of the freighter she’d agreed to keep clean in return for passage to Aldrin. She’d swallowed the tablets, set a candle alight between her legs, and pondered the flames that made the elements that made the worlds.

Nothing came. The Suns Trinity were not inclined to enlighten her right now. Perhaps They didn’t want her to dwell on irrelevancies. The clipper had to be destroyed, regardless of why it was there.

When she opened her eyes, the clipper was still in her sights, but something odd was happening. It was shifting, its dark edges blurring against the infinite blackness. She swallowed. She’d definitely forgotten her Psilex. Hopefully this would be the worst of it. She could still kill the damn thing. She drew a bead and tightened her finger on the firing trigger...

Suddenly an enormous eye opened on the clipper’s port side. The bright blue eyeball shifted left and right before making direct contact with her green ones. It narrowed, as though it recognized her.

“Space!” She yanked her stick upward, pulling the Striker out of its attack run. Most of her fire missed, except for the last few bolts that caught harmlessly on the enemy’s shields. She shot over the Imperial craft and banked her fighter sharply to starboard, looping back toward the ship’s blazing drive. The enemy was turning back toward the battle flashing in the distance.

“Oh no you don’t!” She opened fire once more. Red energy met blue-white shielding in a flashing display that lingered on her vision seconds longer than it should have. The clipper continued on its course back toward the fight, peppering her with fire from its rearmost guns. And those shots bit deeply into her shields whenever they hit. Tammy jinked her fighter every few seconds, but the hits struck home more often than not. Her shields had been eroded down to fifty percent and although her scans showed the enemy’s were in worse shape, that wouldn’t help her if hers broke before theirs did.

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