God Ship (Obsidiar Fleet Book 3)
Page 25
Time and again, the report hinted, implied or just outright stated that the ES Abyss was a far less capable vessel than the Sciontrar. That was expected, since the Sciontrar was a battleship and one of the newest in the Ghast fleet. It was still troubling – it appeared the aliens had begun to open up another technological lead. There were gaps here and there in the Ghast capabilities and Duggan had a few new factories coming onstream soon that would push humanity once more to the fore. In theory it didn’t matter, since they were allies. In reality, Duggan preferred to be ahead of the game rather than playing catch up.
There was another report on the table, this one being the cause of his disquiet, and also the reason he most worried there’d never be an opportunity for the Confederation to fully flex its military muscles.
The report was from his Critical Data Analysis team. They’d thrown every available processing resource at the fission data captured by the Sciontrar and had come up with a result. Their analysis confirmed the arrival of a single Vraxar ship, which had attempted to disguise its fission signature when it performed a lightspeed transit away from the wormhole created by the Gate Maker. Duggan had no idea why it needed to hide anything.
The analysis team had helpfully provided an estimate of the new ship’s dimensions. It was bigger than Ix-Gorghal. Duggan cast his mind back to his conversation with the captured Vraxar. It had provided him with another name and said the Vraxar wanted to bring a second ship through at the same time as Ix-Gorghal. He knew the name of what had come – it was Ix-Gastiol. Now the Vraxar had their two most powerful spaceships in Confederation Space and they also had the ES Determinant’s memory arrays.
The one ray of hope was that the enemy hadn’t yet cracked the static data on the array. When they did, there would be no hope. Like all good leaders, he always had something in reserve. He picked up a third folder, entitled Project: Last Stand and opened the brown cover. Reading it brought tears to his eyes and he wondered what humanity had done to be brought to the brink in this way.
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