Trial by Leviathan by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward [Ward, Blaze]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

26

Bridge, Sundering Wrath

Divna had returned to the bridge, letting Captain Maric have an extra two hours of sleep and downtime. He had been on duty for thirty hours at this point, and she’d seen the exhaustion in his eyes.

She wasn’t much better, but she’d eaten, slept, and felt almost ready to go. Stealing reserves from tomorrow was the old saying, but she needed them today, and Sundering Wrath still had a long sail home to get to base, so everyone would have a chance to recover afterwards.

Mistakes from being too bleary eyed was the risk today. She needed to address that. Standing a watch herself, instead of maintaining her august aloofness, helped. And it hadn’t been that many years since she’d been the Captain of a vessel like this, before being promoted to Marshal.

“Sensors, any change to your readings?” Divna asked the woman currently on duty.

She didn’t know many names, once you got down to the enlisted folks sitting watches with her, but the ship was running something like normal night right now, with about half of the main officers having downtime.

“Negative, Marshal Babic,” the woman said. “Ugly mess of noise on all bands, but especially heavy on a lot of the radio wavelengths. We’d be having a difficult time communicating with the gunboats if everyone wasn’t operating under radio silence.”

Divna nodded.

It was like skinny dipping in a lake at night, wondering if that thing that had brushed your leg was a fish, a log, or something else. The danger could be thrilling, but she’d have just as well chased Marrakesh back to Albany and maybe gotten a few lucky shots that let her do enough damage to kill or capture Alexis Borsheva.

Anything to neutralize that woman. She was simply too dangerous to be allowed to keep designing new weapons for A’Zedi.

“Pilot, show me a navigational plot on the holographic display,” Divna ordered next.

The sphere filled up, even going so far as to include the haze, presumably for verisimilitude. Messy.

One blue arrowhead showing Sundering Wrath. Three green arrowheads showing the gunboats. Each had launched using nothing but the navigational thrusters that allowed them to dock, so none were all that far away, if battle broke out.

Certainly in no proper escort position. Nor poised to fall upon a tug like Marrakesh, except where Sundering Wrath would be close enough to join the assault quickly when the gunboats swarmed.

If only they could find the damned ship.

Divna called up a file on her own board and reread what little was known about Captain Padraig Boru. It was pitifully thin. Already, her own notes about this chase had doubled the length, merely from her suppositions on how smart the man must be to have reacted that quickly.

Perhaps dangerous enough by himself to warrant being killed or captured?

Borsheva was a civilian. Either outcome was acceptable. Boru, as a commanding officer, would be treated with extreme care, were he to fall into her hands. Wronlori captains would face the same treatment, so everyone in uniform played nice, expecting that they would be traded home after a reasonable time period.

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.