God Ship (Obsidiar Fleet Book 3) by Anthony James

Author:Anthony James [James, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-23T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Duggan was blessed or cursed with a brain that never ran short of practical ideas about how to solve a problem. The snippets divulged by the captive Vraxar made him think the aliens either realised they’d bitten off more than they could chew when they lost a big chunk of their fleet at Cheops-A and had sent this Ix-Gorghal to bolster their remaining forces, or they’d found a new species elsewhere and wished to overcome the Confederation as quickly as possible in order to move on to the next target. It might be that neither was correct, yet he felt confident he was thinking along the right lines. It was also becoming apparent that the Vraxar were voracious in their appetite for war, and, rather than taking tentative steps, they gathered intelligence and then attacked quickly.

“Cerys, please scan our data archives for any mention of a vessel called Ix-Gorghal.”

The answer came back immediately and was spoken in a voice so sultry it made Duggan wonder what on earth his computer-generated personal assistant was playing at. “There is no mention of those words in our archives, nor anything which probability suggests may have been derived from those words.”

“Please access the records we extracted from the Valpian and scan for any mention of a large-scale engagement between the Estral and the Vraxar.”

The Valpian was an Estral cruiser which Duggan and his squad had captured on a hard-fought mission several decades before. It was during this mission he’d first started to suspect that the Estral were fighting on too many fronts. At the time, the Valpian was one of the Estral’s newest, most advanced warships and likely a prototype designed specifically to combat the Vraxar. Now, the fully-intact and operational cruiser sat on a disused part of the Tucson base. Duggan visited it often, if just to sit on the bridge and think about his past.

Detriment, Crimson, Valpian, Rampage, Ransor-D. Tybalt. The names rolled through his head, each one tied to memories of success, failure and endless death.

“Fleet Admiral Duggan?”

He shook his head clear and realised Cerys was waiting for his input.

“Please excuse me. What did you say?”

“No excuses necessary, Fleet Admiral.” The voice oozed with seduction, leaving Duggan flummoxed as to what was going on. “I simply reminded you that we were only able to break the encryption on 83.439% of the Valpian’s data cores and that the results will therefore be incomplete.”

The process of cracking into the Estral arrays was a slow one and it had taken years to achieve 83.439%. Eventually it reached the point where one of Duggan’s predecessors had called it off in order to utilise the processing resources elsewhere. The Estral hadn’t returned and the operation had simply never resumed.

“Fine, please give me a summary of your findings.”

“Very well. The Valpian’s databanks record 1638 engagements between Estral warships and Vraxar. Most were sightings or encounters involving a single ship on each side.”

“How many involving twenty warships or more on the Estral side?”

“There were 210 such engagements.”

The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.