The Red King - Michael A. Martin [7]
“No response to our challenges, Drech’tor,” said another junior officer a few moments later, her voice hard and businesslike.
As the alien ships grew swiftly larger on the screen, Frane’s initial impression of them became ever stronger. With their sleek, winged shapes and iridescent gray-green hulls, they truly did resemble nothing so much as a flock of predatory birds on the hunt. And they were bearing down on Gherran’s ships, flying in a wedge-shaped formation that implied a merciless sense of purpose. Frane couldn’t help but admire their grace and coordination as they moved as one, as though guided by a single, resolutely determined mind.
“They don’t look like any Devilships I ever saw,” Frane said to no one in particular, and no one replied. Neither he nor his father had been alive during the Devil Wars that Burgess had ended, but they had both seen pictures from that era.
Each of the alien ships’ forward weapons tubes now emanated a menacing emerald glow. As the interlopers drew closer, Frane could see several small but agile Neyel destroyers approaching them on a gently curving intercept course. At Gherran’s direction, the forward tubes of the Neyel ships released a lethal braid of bright red particle beams and a fusillade of armored projectiles.
The initial Neyel salvo seemed to have little effect on its targets, whose own glowing weapons ports responded by unleashing powerful streams of directed energy. The alien vessels’ armaments blazed as brightly as the heart of a star, forcing Frane to look away momentarily, despite the viewer’s light-filtering system.
A sidelong glance moments later confirmed the worst: the aliens were tearing through Gherran’s ships as though they were defenseless. Within moments, three destroyers had flared up in roughly spherical, roseate eruptions of fire, vessel and crew alike vaporized in an instant commingling of molecular fire and hard vacuum.
As Gherran rattled his terse, precise orders to his own control room staff, the foremost of the alien ships loosed their weapons for a second salvo, their formation passing by without so much as pausing, as though their opposition was unworthy of the invaders’ valuable time. A loud BOOM! shook the control room, as though the vessel it drove had just collided with an asteroid. The deck lurched perhaps forty-five degrees before the inertial compensators set things more or less right. Frane instinctively grabbed a nearby railing, which glowed in the suddenly dimmed lighting. His tail wrapped tightly about one of the railing posts as an added measure of security.
The ship rocked yet again, ringing like some great duranium bell as a console exploded nearby, singeing Frane’s hair and causing his eyeslits to slam shut involuntarily. Fierce heat scorched him, even through his hardened Neyel skin.
When he opened his eyes, he saw clouds of acrid-smelling coolant hissing into the smoky air as various crew members busied themselves putting out fires all around the control room, while simultaneously running the ship’s defensive and offensive systems. On the viewer, another pair of Neyel ships tore themselves apart, their extensive battle wounds finally yielding terminal conflagrations.
Coughing, his stinging eyes watering, Frane noticed a pair of bodies sprawled beside the wreckage of the exploded console, both in the unmistakably awkward postures of death.
One of the corpses belonged to his father.
Not knowing what else to do, Frane knelt beside Gherran, feeling for his carotid artery. His father, the man who had sired and then abandoned him and his mother in favor of his endless duties to a corrupt and belligerent Hegemony, now lay lifeless on the soot-smeared deck. He took one of Gherran’s still, gray hands.
And noticed the bracelet.
Without knowing why he was doing it, Frane took the bracelet and slipped it into a pocket in his robe. He was, after all, his father