War Fleet: The Complete Series (Books 1-5) by Daniel Young & Joshua James

Author:Daniel Young & Joshua James [Young, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-30T22:00:00+00:00

110

Oort sat in his cockpit, watching the dots move around on the cross-section of the Okranti on his viewscreen. He was exhausted—he’d never had to teleport in and out of a ship so often in such a short timeframe before. Olsen’s crew were proving to be resilient.

But Oort now had four agents under his control, and he’d soon gain a fifth. They’d already knocked Lieutenant Schmidt unconscious. It would only be a matter of time until Oort turned the entire crew of the Okranti over to his side.

He had a feed open to the CIC module on the ship and was listening to it. He flicked his wrist out and pointed a bony finger at his screen to instruct it to do something. The view changed to reveal Captain Olsen and Commander Novak looking up at their viewscreen. The cross-section was still there on top of this, now a very faint overlay.

Oort wanted to study the expressions on the crewmembers’ faces. He wanted to understand. Olsen was tapping his foot. Novak didn’t seem to display much, or at least she wouldn’t seem to be expressing much to the other humans around her. But Oort had observed the emotions of thousands of races across the universe, and Novak was easy to read. Oort not only had the instincts to do so, but he also had temperature and brainwave readings on active on his screen, and he knew how to interpret them.

Novak didn’t express fear. Rather, she seemed to feel guilt. Guilt that she couldn’t do something in this situation, perhaps. Or guilt that she shouldn’t have let Schmidt go out there and should have gone out herself. Oort didn’t know which kind of guilt it was—he couldn’t read her thoughts. Still, he wished he could know what she was thinking, as the young commander fascinated him.

So he listened with intent and continued to watch the emotions of Novak as she and Olsen dealt with the situation at hand.

“We’ve lost him,” Olsen said. “Shit… Another man down. I knew we shouldn’t have sent him out.”

Everyone around Olsen had fallen silent. They seemed afraid not only of their predicament, but also of the captain himself. All of them, that was, except Novak, who didn’t seem to be able to shake that guilt.

Novak was so much like Oort, in a way. She’d been trained to repress her emotions, yet she still felt them inside her. They’d never been able to program them out of her. Is the same true of me? Oort wondered. He felt the guilt surge up in him, and his skin lit up in violet. For a while, he didn’t repress it. He let the glow wash over the cockpit and the controls, cooling it somewhat.

The emotion continued for a moment, but after that Oort realized that he couldn’t let this stupidity continue. He needed to show the Okranti what he was capable of. If he could drive them towards the coordinates that their fleet admiral had given them, maybe they would survive.

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