Stargate Travelers' Tales 1 - Far Horizons by Sally Malcolm

Author:Sally Malcolm [Malcolm, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

Atlantis: Consort

by Amy Griswold

Thousands of years before the Atlantis expedition, the Wraith rule victorious over a galaxy abandoned by the few surviving Ancients, but they face a new and deadly threat: attack by the Asuran Replicators. Fighting to save his queen’s hive from destruction, Guide, the Wraith later known to the Atlantis expedition as ‘Todd,’ searches for a way to turn the tide of war…

Guide wrestled his dart into a steep turn, arrowing between the hive and the Asuran cruiser through a hailstorm of glowing Asuran drones. As he had hoped, a cluster of the tiny hunting weapons fixed on his dart, streaming after him in his wake and away from the Wraith hive’s fragile hull. The hive had taken heavy damage in the Asuran attack and was dangerously weakened on its starboard side.

Three other darts were following his lead, moving to draw off more of the drones as he rolled his own ship to keep the pursuing weapons a few heartbeats from his dart’s tail. He could feel the other pilots’ satisfaction as the drone weapons veered away from the hive, and feel them begin their own evasive maneuvers. Swift’s dart was hindmost, and he hesitated a moment too long before beginning his turn; in an instant his dart was swarmed by the Asuran weapons, shattering as they burst against its fragile hull.

Guide wrenched his mind away from Swift’s as his agony flared and then moments later ended. Poorly named, he thought, and perhaps also poorly led. They had come out of hyperspace nearly on top of an Asuran battleship, and fled in the direction Guide had advised as best, directly into the waiting ambush of three smaller cruisers. Pinned between them, they had been a sitting target, and all their maneuvering had only opened up one narrow chance to break for open space.

It meant bringing the hive all too close to one of the cruisers, with only the darts to keep the Asuran weapons from battering the hive’s hull apart. The queen was at the controls of the hive herself, bringing it about on the precise course that might let them escape. The readouts streaming across the inner surface of the dart told him that course was true, but he hardly needed them. He could feel Snow’s mind brushing his, and trusted her cool confidence in the course she had plotted.

And yet it still seemed too easy. Another dart was shattering under drone weapon attack, a ripple of fear spreading through the thinning dart wings. He shut his mind to all of it, watching only the readouts, trying to think.

The drone weapons were familiar horrors, but they weren’t the worst ones the Asurans possessed. The nanites that made up their own bodies had that distinction, able to swarm like tiny parasites through the flesh of men or hive ships, consuming it like so much meat to build more abominations like themselves. They were harrying the hive, trying to cripple it, but they might not need to if they could offer an attractive enough distraction.

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