Psi Wars 3: Imperium: A Military Space Opera Series by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2023-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

10

Trint shoveled the food down automatically, tasting nothing, barely registering its passage. The biological parts of his body required nutrients, and while eating was an inefficient way to provide it, it was the only method available to him. Once upon a time, when he and the other lab-assembled cyborgs in the Tahni Imperial Guard had been the strong blade of the God-Emperor, the technicians had fed them through ports directly into their stomachs. Such services were no longer available, and although the ship’s AI could probably have synthesized such a set-up, he found he didn’t mind the ritual of eating.

At least there was gravity on the ship. Had he been forced to remain in orbit this long on a Tahni ship, or a human one, he would have found the constant free fall inconducive to digestion. But fate or destiny or blind chance had delivered him to the Predecessor outpost on a world no longer reachable by the Transition Drive, and on that world had been the ship. The ship had returned him home to Tahn-Skyyiah and had provided him with a means to defend that home from all threats, internal and external. And being a Predecessor vessel, it was capable of producing its own shipboard gravity, among many other, even more useful things.

“Your visitor has arrived.”

The ship’s AI had a voice not so different from the chief of biological sciences for the Emperor, and Trint wondered if the ancient machine had drawn the memory from him over his neurolink.

“Provide her with a docking umbilical,” Trint commanded, placing his food bowl in a recycling vat and rising from the stool.

Sitting was unnecessary for him; his cybernetic endoskeleton locked in place. But it was a habit he’d acquired to fit in with the other Tahni on those rare occasions when he visited the planet below him, and it was something to which he’d grown accustomed, like eating, a small ritual of normalcy in a time when normalcy was in short supply.

The interior of the Predecessor ship was spacious and appeared even more so due to the holographic projections hiding the walls behind images of space, or his homeworld, or the serene groves outside the Shrine of the Ancestors. He’d been there once, with the Emperor himself, back near the beginning of the war. Though the Emperor had proved a false god and a very mortal one, the groves still provided a sense of peace.

He waved a hand through the image of the groves and they faded like a cloud of smoke, revealing a utility airlock. The holographic displays on either side of the lock showed him the ship, a standard cutter, a human vessel bought surplus from the Fleet after the war, ubiquitous in the Commonwealth. This one had Aurora stenciled across its nose and he recognized the ship and the name… and the woman who came through the airlock.

“It’s been so long, Trint.” She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight, and he returned it with none of the awkwardness he’d once felt at the touch of a human.

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