[The Medusa Fold] by Nick Adams

Author:Nick Adams [Adams, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub

35

The bridge, starship Gabriel, the Prasinos system, Milky Way

* * *

‘Holy moly!’ exclaimed Phil, as he jumped the Gabriel into the Prasinos system.

It’d taken a few days for them to reach the home system of the GDA back in the Milky Way. They’d thought it strange there wasn’t a Katadromiko guarding the gateway as they went through. Now they found out why, as the holomap updated above them.

They had conformed to the warnings by jumping into the system a much greater distance from Dasos than usual, in temporarily set up jump zones on the outer edge.

‘Ah, crap,’ said Linda. ‘Look at all that shit flying around. How are we going to find a way through all that?’

‘Dasos is completely covered in clouds and storms,’ said Pol, zooming in on the home of the GDA. ‘It’s bloody cold and windy down there.’

‘You’d think they’d have more ships cleaning up all this debris,’ said Phil.

‘I think the debris are the ships,’ said Pol. ‘Judging by my readings it’s all bits of navy and domestic vessels.’

‘What the hell happened here?’ asked Linda. ‘To do this amount of damage would’ve taken a sizeable enemy fleet and where are those bloody huge defence platforms that surrounded the planet?’

‘Destroyed too,’ said Pol. ‘There’s lumps of them everywhere.’

They watched for a while as the few dozen naval ships returning from around the galaxy had been hastily assembled into some sort of defensive screen around their capital planet. Between them they’d managed to staunch the flow of all but the smallest flotsam from dropping into Dasos’s gravity well.

‘The damage on the surface is extensive,’ said Pol. ‘The massive change in climate must be down to that Klatt octaship thing they were going to use on Paradeisos. Perhaps we need to find that and destroy it.’

‘No need,’ said Linda, studying her screen. ‘It destroyed itself, it says here. After utilising its beam on Dasos, all the shrapnel cut it to pieces.’

‘They didn’t think that one through did they?’ said Phil, shaking his head slowly.

Linda put a call out for Commander Loftt. It only took him ten minutes to reply.

‘It’s Admiral of the Fleet Loftt now,’ came a tired but familiar voice. ‘Are Ed and Andy aboard?’

‘I was kinda hoping they were with you,’ Linda replied in a disappointed tone.

‘They went back to the Medusa galaxy to find you a few days ago,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We must have passed somewhere on the journey here. Congratulations on the new job by the way. I thought you were retired.’

‘All the GDA senior naval officers were lost, along with half the council members in various places.’

‘The President?’ Phil asked.

‘Lost too,’ said Bache. ‘Vice President Milne is now the new President.’

‘Ah, I think I’ve met her,’ said Linda. ‘She has a strange accent from…err…’

‘Scolain.’

‘That’s it,’ she said, now recalling the conversation. ‘A beautiful but cold planet somewhere distant if I remember right.’

‘Indeed, it is,’ Bache confirmed.

‘If you managed to rescue Ed and Andy, have you got Salft in detention now?’ she asked, changing the subject.

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