Conflagration (Psi War Book 2) by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-05T23:00:00+00:00

***

“Hollande, you’re go for launch.”

“Thanks, Colonel Obvious,” Sandi murmured, triggering the maneuvering thrusters.

She didn’t need the announcement; she could see the green indicator light on the display telling her the docking collar had cut the shuttle loose. The steering jets banged against the hull like a hammer, pushing them out of the docking bay, and she waited until the shuttle reached safe distance before hitting the drives.

Acceleration shoved her back into the gel cushion of her seat and she retreated through her implant jacks and up the interface cables connecting her to the assault shuttle’s flight systems. Fire burned in her heart and she soared into the night, embracing the blackness. The planet’s only moon hung in relative stillness over her left shoulder, sullenly incommunicative without even a trace of the radio signals, sensors, or the warmth of life in the dome that had once held the military station there.

It was all gone; everything was gone. The crew of the military moon base had abandoned their posts when Hermes had fallen to Alita, evacuating the system along with anyone else who could get away. She imagined Alita would have made sure she’d cleaned them out before she left the system with her armada; she seemed to have a compulsion to destroy space habitats first, even before she infected the colony worlds.

She’s trying to destroy our civilization, but why?

Ash had said the Changed were controlled by the Ghosts; that was what he’d called them, the remnants of the Predecessor-built sentient AIs that had vanished into Transition Space and never returned. He’d told them that the Ghosts had taken over the Predecessors who’d undergone the Change, had used them to bring down their civilization in a civil war, and now they were doing the same thing with the humans who’d Changed. But why would they care? She still hadn’t been able to figure that part out, and Ash hadn’t seemed to know.

They have a whole universe to themselves, why can’t they leave us alone?

“We getting any radar or lidar hits yet?” Emil Jacobson asked from the seat just behind hers, in the center of the cockpit.

She withdrew slightly from the interface, just far enough to let herself glance back at him. He barely fit in the acceleration couch with the battle rattle strapped to his armor, and she couldn’t see his face through the narrow, mirrored visor of his helmet. She wanted to be annoyed with the man; he knew the answer to the question as well as she did, since his helmet’s HUD was still tied into the shuttle’s systems. But he was just scared, and she knew from working with him before that he blathered a bit when he was scared.

“Nothing yet,” she said. “If we pick up anything, I’ll let you know.”

Not that there’s anything you could do about it strapped in here next to me except hang on and try not to puke.

Her eyes lingered on Randall Munroe for a moment as she turned back forward. He was

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