SAW 1: Stars at War Read Free Page A

Donovan shouted,
“Get us out of here! Put that asteroid wall in between us!”
    “Will do, sir!”
    The Asterix ’s gravitic drive went to full, while it
still could. The big gravity emitter fore and back glowed to purple and the
ship accelerated full speed at 0.4 kilometers per second squared.
    “The enemy behind is firing on us!” damage control called.
    Donovan closed his eyes for all the good it would do. The
enemy is firing. The enemy is firing at my rear!
    The bridge shook to gigantic blasts that tore through the
Asterix’s aft armor like paper. Damage control sensors blazed with alerts from
many of the aft quarters. Damage control yelled out, “I got red-red-black from
aft decks C12 to E19! Sections are blinking!”
    Donovan clenched tight to his armrests with his gloved
hands. Hold together, Asterix. We’ve been through so much. Don’t fail me
now!
    The damage sensors kept blinking and the starship kept
buckling, but she kept accelerating forward.
    Another shake—then silence filled the bridge…
    “The asteroid wall is in between us,” helm advised.
    Donovan let out a big sigh. “Damage report! Tell me
everything that got destroyed.”
    The DC officer read a big, big list of damaged aft sections.
It kept going and going, but—at least the Asterix was still alive.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    Flag Bridge, Mobile Battle Fortress
    VSF Epsilon Decimus
     
    H oly
Science! Prancort wanted to yell. But who in the flag bridge could bear
their admiral yelling at air?
    He just lost fifteen starships to that K-ship attack! True,
the first K-ship had destroyed seven, but once it killed off half his battle
wall, the rest were now meat for the grinding. The snakes in that battle would
slaughter the rest, and he couldn’t pull them out fast enough—well, at most one
or two would survive. Then the second K-ship, although caught before it did
irrevocable damage, wrecked the shields out of the Asterix and the Pendam .
The Pendam …was Prancort’s lucky vessel. It saved the battle in Block
E-9-C with its early arrival, and now it was dead.
    So many dead—he lost 70,000 soldiers in less than ten
minutes.
    Damn those K-ships!
    The enemy didn’t have missiles, but they did have torpedo
ships. These damn ships could generate enough of a gravity field, so small
rocks wouldn’t damage them before they reached their target. Once they reached
certain proximity, they detonated in a gigantic antimatter explosion. The sheer
shockwave of plasma wrecked nearby ships.
    He didn’t think the snakes had any, but it’s probably why
they were enthusiastic in fighting a close-quarter asteroid field battle.
K-ships were usually ineffective in normal battles in which distances were up
to hundreds of thousands of kilometers, where it could be targeted from far away.
That, combined with its weak shields and short blast radius, made it an
expensive but ineffective weapon. But in this close-range battle, the k-ship
really left its mark. They could get close enough to use their blast radius and
the space dust just made the shockwave worse.
    Now, when Prancort thought about it, everything the snake
admiral did made sense. It made sense to wait until the battle became joined
before sending in the kamikaze ships. If his units hadn’t been preoccupied, he
could have easily shot down those k-ships before they even got close. Now, he
understood why the enemy commander waited so patiently, prior to the general
attack. That snake waited his K-ships to arrive from somewhere far away, where
it’d been stored just in case of this type of encounter.  He also finally
understood why the enemy admiral tried to get all the human ships in Block
E-8-D to wall up with their rear exposed to the K-ship attack….a diversionary
tactic.
    Which meant—there were probably more K-ships—creeping in
other blocks! He needed to warn his fleet! He punched a button, opening a
fleet-wide channel to all ships. "All ships, be careful of K-ships! Watch
out and shoot them before