The Insentient by Hill Adam

Author:Hill, Adam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2023-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

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From his perch above the ship, Brixon could see Eeegra’s greyish surface begin to get smaller as they backed away from the rushing strikers. In a blur, Rutennox’s ship collided with a striker, locked in a mortal death grip, and began trying to drag it down into lower orbit. As they spun away towards planet-side, the striker spewed metallicid wildly about as it spiralled.

Brixon, his firing scripts issued and nav requests approved, looked up as the nose cones on the bridges of the remaining two enemy ships began to glow. The heads or bridge of strikers were triangular shaped like that of an insect, with the two raised corners housed in a layered translucent energy glass, giving the eight-man piloting crew a 120-degree field of view. It even had R.V. array sprouting out like antenna above the two clear domes to accentuate the look. They fired, more like squirted, metallicid from their glowing nose tubes. He glanced at his consoles to make sure the gun decks would have the power to execute their strips, and then he felt the ship begin to roll and looked down at his firing clock, represented as a tab in the interface buttons lining his mind’s eye.

Kalla, still on her staging mark in the skin bay, watched through their brain-go as Brixon’s fingers danced across the weapons management console. She watched through Brixon’s eyes as the Kratood rolled port relative to the first striker, like a giant water beast turning onto its side. Professional navigation officers timed the roll perfectly, causing the first striker’s shot to go wide. The second striker’s shot streamed through the energy dispersion field, burning off twenty per tenths of its volume before a concentration broke through and splashed across the Kratood’s dorsal plating. Brixon could not see the metallicid directly as the Kratood rolled and watched a ghostly image of the strike on a channel on the MDS. He felt like every circuit in his brain was firing, as he managed the updating firing scripts, watched the battle unfold on the MDS and tracked six other events on panels at this station, including preparations to pound the surface, there was something hiding down there.

As the Krat continued to roll, it began to right itself relative to the center Striker, now the lead vessel, that was swooping in, legs spread and harpoon jutting forward. Brixon operated the Krat’s lower dorsal rotating deck, containing pressurized tanks for fluids. Sometimes the hoses were used to clean or maintain the ship, and sometimes they were used for repair. Here, Brixon re-routed one of the tanks and closed the clutch housing on three of the hoses. It was going to fire a flammable heating jelly. The major vulnerability of metallicid was its susceptibility to heat, ironically. Heats, even atmospheric heat levels, caused the microbes to lose particles and desiccate.

The Kratood righted itself, still driving backwards away from the two remaining strikers. At one hundred spans, Brixon felt a stab of fear at Rupellax marines aiming to crush the Kratood.

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