War Factory: Transformations Book Two by Neal Aher Read Free Book Online Page A

Penny Royal had obviously been tinkering with its system. Its fusion drive then ignited, ramping up acceleration to something way beyond what any human passenger could have survived, and steering thrusters were firing, straining its newly repaired structure. Garrotte found access to its sensors unhindered and so looked around.
    They had arrived in the shadow of a gas giant and were currently dodging asteroids on their way out into the light of a sun—a star only marginally brighter than the rest in the firmament. Garrotte mapped the system, picking out an ice giant further out surrounded by a large collection of moons, three inner worlds about the size of Mars and two Earth-mass planets within what some had described as the green belt. For a moment, it lacked enough data to get a location, but by comparing local star systems against internal star maps, Garrotte made a discovery: “Shit, we’re in prador territory—this is the Kingdom!”
    Yes, now Garrotte recognized the massive space stations about those two worlds, and the structures under the coastal seas and sprawling onto the landmasses. The stations all tended to be of a similar shape—vertically squashed pears—while many of the spaceships nearby were of a similar design. They had indeed arrived at a planetary system lying inside the Prador Kingdom.
    “They are too busy to notice,” whispered a voice seemingly issuing just behind the Garrotte’s metaphorical ear.
    “Talking to me now,” Garrotte said.
    A target frame appeared over the nearest of the oceanic worlds, which, by Garrotte’s calculations, lay over fifty light minutes away. Garrotte took the hint and focused in on it, watching across the spectrum, cleaning up imagery and mapping all visible structures in its mind. Something was definitely going on down there.
    A series of explosions had just torn apart one section of an undersea city, the spume from them only now surfacing. As Garrotte watched, a fast shuttle, its design quite sharkish and more aerodynamic than was the prador custom, exploded from the sea and accelerated vertically. Shortly afterwards two near-world attack boats of the kind seen during the war—great bulky teardrop-shaped vessels ringed with weapons nacelles—shot out of the ocean in pursuit. Even as they left the water, they shed missiles which ignited their fusion drives and hurtled up ahead of them. Garrotte felt sure that the fast shuttle stood no chance at all. Those attack boats looked clumsy but possessed phenomenal acceleration and enough armament to rip up a city.
    “The children of Vlern have learned from Sverl,” whispered Penny Royal, “and have put their augmentations and their bio-weapons to good use. Fortunately for them, they were directed to a place lacking in any elements of the King’s Guard, else things would not be going so well.”
    Going so well?
    Garrotte presumed that Penny Royal was talking about whoever was in that fast shuttle which the attack boats appeared likely to be about to smear across the sky. And really, even if by some miracle that shuttle managed to avoid those missiles, warships in orbit were moving to intercept. The leading ships were destroyers, while the one coming in behind was somewhat larger. Studying the last vessel, Garrotte noted that it was one of those ships produced towards the end of the war and which the Polity had retrospectively classed as ST dreadnoughts—Series Terminal dreadnoughts. This was a ship the prador had manufactured in response to the rapidly growing number of Polity warships. In building such vessels, they paid more attention to utility and speed of construction than to appearance. The ST dreadnought was about half again the size of standard, was not shaped like a prador carapace but a squat cylinder with powerful fusion drives at one end, fusion steering thrusters protruding all round, and a serious collection of armament sticking out at the other end like a city of skyscrapers. They hadn’t done so