The Exile by G J Ogden

Author:G J Ogden [Ogden, G J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ogden Media Ltd
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

The good homewrecker

Sterling peered out at the crippled Sa’Nerran Heavy Cruiser from the cockpit of the shuttle, while Commander Banks piloted the craft toward the stricken vessel. Due to the devastating close-range assault by the Invictus, more than half of the cruiser had been rendered uninhabitable. However, even though the cruiser was dead in space, with its weapon systems and engines disabled, it still clung to life like a battle-scarred old shark. Several sections of the three-kilometer-long behemoth remained intact and pressurized, including its bridge and command deck.

Sterling’s plan was to land the combat shuttle near the command center of the alien vessel then breach through an emergency escape hatch. Once the assault team had fought their way to the alien bridge, they would hack into the ship’s command computer and download the data from the central memory core. Contained somewhere in the archives was the information that would point them to James Colicos. It was their only chance to pick up the trail of breadcrumbs that they’d lost at the entrance to the newly discovered Sa’Nerran aperture. If they failed then their mission was just as dead in the water as the heavy cruiser. Without Colicos, any chance of counteracting the alien neural control weapon would be lost.

Based on scans of the Sa’Nerran cruiser, Sterling had concluded that the bulk of the alien forces on board were either already dead, or cut off from the command deck. Nevertheless, Sterling was planning to go in hard. Seated in the rear of the shuttle was Lieutenant Razor and Lieutenant Shade along with the Invictus’ four best commandoes. Shade’s forces would secure a route to the bridge, where Lieutenant Razor would then hack the computer and recover the data.

Sterling glanced back at his engineer from the second seat of the combat shuttle. There was a hunger in her eyes that he’d not seen before. The talented engineer appeared eager to earn back the trust and respect she believed she had lost from her commander. The reality was that Sterling was not angry or disappointed with Razor over what happened to the Invictus after surging through the new aperture. Razor couldn’t have known what would happen; none of them could. This was uncharted territory and risk was part of the game. However, the fact that Razor had not allowed the incident to rattle her confidence was encouraging. And the hungrier his unique engineer was to prove herself the more Sterling was sure that she would succeed.

“Thirty seconds to hard dock,” said Commander Banks.

Despite this announcement, his first officer was still accelerating so hard toward the cruiser that it looked like she planned to ram the massive vessel. However, the element of surprise was crucial to the success of their plan. As such, hot-rodding through space like a cadet trying to impress his classmates was a necessary risk.

“Assault team, get ready to breach,” Shade called out to the row of four commandoes seated opposite her. Each of them wore a helmet with a full cover face mask, giving them an anonymous, almost robotic-appearance.

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.