War Fleet: Planet Siege by Daniel Young

Author:Daniel Young [Young, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

22

Olsen kept his gaze glued on the viewscreen of the Okranti’s CIC, watching both the Foorints’ and the trawler’s every move. He’d already had Santiago scan the trawler for life signs, and there was no creature on board. Meaning either the captain had abandoned ship, had turned mutant alongside the rest of the crew, or the ship was being controlled by an AI.

The potential causes and consequences of each of these scenarios sent shivers down Olsen’s spine. The fact that the Foorints didn’t seem to want to punish him for his previous actions spooked him even more.

He wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve, just as he saw the trawler’s engines fire up. They lit space around them bright blue for a moment, and then the trawler began to turn away from the Foorint fleet.

“Sir,” Cadinouche said. “It appears the ship’s powering up to go to FTL-warp.”

“What the hell,” Olsen said. “Santiago, are you sure there’s no life signs aboard the ship?”

“I am, sir,” she said.

“Any chance that they’re somehow jamming our radars, hiding their pilot beneath a wall of lead or something?”

“We can see the ship in full, sir,” Santiago replied. “There’s no sign of any protective walls or anything like that.”

“Then how can it possibly hope to escape? The Foorints will fire on anything that leaves this sector.” Plus, its pilot didn’t seem to care about the fact that there was a hole in the back of the ship. It could travel at normal speeds with that, but going to FTL-warp would melt it from the insides.

Unless… Olsen tugged at his collar as he thought about the implications. “Rob? Do you think a supernova is the only thing needed to detonate that spatial detonator?”

The cyborg turned back to Olsen. “We don’t know what might catalyze the explosion,” he replied. “But it’s certainly true that an unshielded body trying to go to light speed would be exposed to large quantities of energy. It might be enough to trigger something, although given the bomb’s size and physical makeup, I doubt it could cause an explosion of large enough radius to do significant damage here.”

But in all honesty, as Brownstone had already pointed out, they hadn’t a clue how these weapons worked. Chang had explained to Olsen that a matter-based weapon causing a sun to go supernova defied the laws of physics as they knew them. There might have been more energy packed inside these things than any of them realized, in ways that their science couldn’t yet fathom. Certainly no one had heard of a weapon that could turn sentient races into mindless mutants.

Setting a bomb off here would make a lot of sense. Oort had seemed to want to eliminate Olsen and his crew at the Ripley sector. If he still had that goal, he might have decided to lure them here just before the superweapon exploded.

If it had enough power packed within, it might not destroy just the Okranti, but also Capstan III and the surrounding fleet.

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