Beast Mode: A Space Opera Adventure (A Cauldron of Stars Book 3) by Felix R. Savage

Author:Felix R. Savage [Savage, Felix R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knights Hill Publishing
Published: 2019-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

31

Like other Fleet ships I’d been on, the Bifrost had an open-plan foredeck, dotted with command stations. The bridge was the central group of command stations, an arc of consoles and screens. The pilot and comms officer wore full-face headsets, jacked into their AR visualizations. Smith floated in stirrups in front of the largest screen. Dolph hung limply beside him. Irene floated out of the way, at right angles to the rest of us, like a bloodstained angel. The Marines and Fleet officers studiously ignored us.

Burden pushed me at the others. I found stirrups on the other side of Dolph. “OK?” I whispered to him.

He just bobbed his head, smiling through the blood. Of course he wasn’t OK.

Smith gestured at the screen in front of us. The Bifrost’s composite feed materialized, showing the blackness of space and the glowing blue curvature of Tech Duinn. As I had thought, we were still in orbit.

But we were not alone.

Heads-up tags labelled computer-enhanced visuals of other ships in orbit.

A Fleet destroyer and a supercruiser, the Siddhartha and the Lourdes.

More tags appeared: the Calspriffen Dek, the Mysozo Horan, and the Cisquibet Spume. I stared. These were Ek ships. Correction: they were Guardian ships. Each one was a pointy oblong, like two cones joined together at the base. The central rings rotated, pulsing with red and blue light.

“Each of those things is the size of a city,” Smith said. He put on a headset. “Smith here.”

I kept staring. This was the first time I had ever seen a show of Guardian hardware on this scale.

“Understood,” Smith said into his headset. “Yes. Acknowledged. We will be recording this.”

The composite feed panned. The surface of Tech Duinn filled the screen. I spotted the central mountain range of Eas Rudah, cloud-wreathed. The clouds were boiling. They looked oddly dark—

Fiery lava jetted out of the clouds, reddening them. I flinched, even though we were two hundred klicks up.

Smith took off his headset. “The Guardians have courteously provided us with a demonstration of their security policy,” he said tightly.

“Was that …”

“Dagda’s Knoll,” Dolph slurred. “Or roundabouts.”

“Correct,” Smith said.

If any Necros, or any of the Urush bots, had survived the gas explosion, they survived no longer. I guess I should have been cheering. But as the mushroom cloud climbed into Tech Duinn’s upper atmosphere, I remembered Justin flicking his lighter. His body had been interred in the bunker amidst his fallen foes. Now, it was vaporized, along with half of Mt. Moy Itha. The clouds swelled higher, a fiery epitaph to his bravery.

Smith interrupted my thoughts. “That was just a demonstration,” he shouted to the Fleet personnel within line-of-sight of the bridge, who were gaping at the screen. “The real fireworks are yet to come. They’ve lodged notice of their intentions—”

He broke off.

“They want to talk to you,” he snapped at Dolph and me. “I anticipated this. Let me be clear. They will talk. You will not say a solitary goddamn word unless I give you the OK.”

The screen in front of us displayed the interior of a Guardian ship, with Eks walking around.

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