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

well against the Polity because all that weaponry in one place made a plum target, while the steering thrusters were vulnerable too. As a consequence of these weaknesses the designer of that ship had apparently suffered the same fate as the erstwhile king of the prador—being injected with hydrofluoric acid and floated out over one of their oceans.
    Still, the shuttle, which had now reached atmosphere and had ramped up enough acceleration to stay ahead of the missiles, stood zero chance of surviving once into vacuum. Even now, the destroyers were probably targeting—
    The ST dreadnought had just fired multiple particle beam blasts, each hitting the leading destroyers straight up their tail pipes. Some fusion drives simply died, two detonated, spraying out like magma eruptions and carving chunks out of the ships concerned. Something else then surfaced into the real just behind them and ignited its own fusion drive to go in amongst them. Garrotte just had time to identify a hundred-ton prador kamikaze before it detonated. The flash of the continent-busting explosion blanked all the ships from view for a moment. When they reappeared, they were tumbling away on the blast front.
    “Ouch,” said Garrotte.
    The blast did not destroy the destroyers because prador armour could take a lot more of a hammering than that. Their crews and captains would have been more than a little shaken up, however. Now the ST dreadnought was accelerating through, one destroyer bouncing away from its hull. Meanwhile the fast shuttle had left atmosphere, but it wasn’t out of trouble yet. The pursuing missiles ignited secondary drives and accelerated faster in vacuum, while the shuttle headed into the incoming blast front.
    Now a file arrived in Garrotte’s mind and opened automatically. The ship AI suppressed the horror it felt at Penny Royal having such easy access to its mind and studied, for all of three seconds, something it would have taken an unaugmented human a week to read.
    “An interesting social experiment,” Garrotte said, trying to be just pragmatic and logical. “Young prador adults are generally cowardly—forgoing individual combat and securing themselves in their sanctums and leaving the combat to their children. However, without children and forced to live close together and cooperate over many years . . .”
    Garrotte waited for Penny Royal to add something more about the young adults from the Rock Pool but then just focused on the battle when the AI didn’t respond. Lasers now—green lasers picked out by the gas and debris of the explosions there. They hit the missiles and tracked them, and one after another, the missiles either died like flames starved of oxygen or detonated. Particle beams next, two of them, blue in vacuum but hazing and turning purplish as they penetrated atmosphere. They each struck the nose of an ascending attack boat and held there, each boat now generating a tail of fire as its armour ablated. An instant later the pilots of those vessels decided on survival, shut down their drives, threw themselves aside on steering thrusters and turned, accelerating back down towards the ocean.
    The fast shuttle bucked in the blast front, then tumbled. It next seemed to fire its steering thrusters at random, but Garrotte noted the sequence was perfect to stabilize the vessel for its ensuing decelerating burn in towards the dreadnought, which was turning. The big ship had opened space doors onto a large shuttle bay. What ensued was more of a crash than a docking manoeuvre, but prador were tough and those aboard the shuttle probably survived it. The dreadnought swept the shuttle inside, ramped up its drive to take it back out from the world just as U-signatures began generating all around the area. It submerged into U-space and was gone, before a whole fleet of destroyers and four other dreadnoughts appeared.
    “So,” said Garrotte, “apart from that interesting file, are you going to offer a further